“A short existential game about alienation and refusal of labor.
Or, if you prefer, a playable music video.”
I felt a trace of Tale of Tales’ The Path – in order to fully experience and “finish” the game the player is required to essentially do the opposite of what the character is told; the opposite of conventional designer-dictated narrative. “Don’t stray from the path” as “Get to your cubicle.”
One could play the game forever, but the monotony of the looping routine gradually becomes agonizing.
Suicide is a game element but is used in an odd way that can’t quite seem to decide if it wants to be reminiscent of “Groundhog Day” or “Moon.”
Some of the most memorable moments are those of player-initiated absurdity. Standing alone in a field in your underwear with a cow, while your idling car blocks traffic being one. Most of it involves being in your underwear, actually.
A curiosity about this “follow/don’t follow”, “do what i say” or “don’t do what i say to do” binary is that in the end, everyone can pretty much discern the ultimate intent of the game designer, following an initial mental re-adjustment, but again, that’s the point, isn’t it?
Are the only true player-subversions of perceived or actual designer intentions through cheating, bugs, or exploits, or is it in unexplored emergence? The latter is an exploration of systems and mechanics interplay, whereas the former can be supplemented with player-constructed narrative explanation? Narrative fallacy?
I found the game to be more contemplative than subversive, and ultimately bleak, but moments of beauty persist.
Is it so possible to shut into a box what “experimental” means for games?
If so – couldn’t an experimental game push the boundaries of what we consider a game at all? Something that pushes against the definitions of given categories and expectations we have for them – something more than just incorporating unorthodox or non-mainstream elements?
What makes an unorthodox element? Swink says that most experimental games toy with our core notions of reality and how it behaves – and thus how we expect things should behave in a simulated environment. Don’t all games do this, to some extent?
The question seems to be simply how far does it go – that is, does the sense of reality in the simulated environment match what FEELS appropriate once we’re immersed, regardless of whether or not our sense of what feels right IS right – and how central is the unexpected behavior to the game mechanics?
Portal, Braid and Shadow Physics all make use of a simulated reality that runs strongly contrary to that of our own experience – but still make sense and are consistent, once a mental check and adjustment is made.
Mario and Sonic make use of representations of characters and elements that also run strongly contrary to our own experience in reality, but we don’t see it as experimental. With a Fire Flower I can shoot a fireball out of my hand… and through the water no less. However this isn’t the central mechanic, and isn’t violating a principle of reality as core to us as the idea that time moves only forward.
Is a truly experimental game a not-game? Most experimental games are all still games after all – systems of rules, meaningful decision-making, winning, losing, progressing.
There seems to be a split between what people consider experimental – one side looking at unusual/brain-bending game mechanics, but still couched firmly within the framework of “gamey” principles – and the other looking at more experiential interactive experiences aiming for immersion, but not being games per se.
Something to watch for from the USC EA Game Innovation Lab:
“The player’s voyage through The Night Journey takes them through a poetic landscape, a space that has more reflective and spiritual qualities than geographical ones. The core mechanic in the game is the act of traveling and reflecting rather than reaching certain destinations – the trip along a path of enlightenment.”
“It’s a game that rewards you for slowing down and for introspection,” says Viola, 59, a pioneer in the medium of video art for more than 35 years. “You’re alone and you’re not even told why you’re there. You just fall out of the sky into the middle of this amazing landscape with mountains, sea, desert, and forest, and go wherever you want,” he explains. “The more you do things mindfully, the more is revealed to you.”
I found this video (posted after the jump) amusing – using a gaming icon to illustrate trends covering a few different topics. Also Ratatat as soundtrack!
Commenter response to the video on Kotaku seems to communicate disdain, ambivalence, or utter bafflement. The struggle seems to be with either the lack of a powerful message or the strangeness of familiar game elements used out of context. It is what it is … only using a somewhat unorthodox medium for the subject matter.
Certainly by this point, Mario and other gaming icons have adequately penetrated the cultural/societal lexicon to be used effectively to communicate an out of context message. Will framing real life issues within the vocabulary of interactive entertainment become more widespread with technological accessibility and increased (possibly) cultural relevance? This also has plenty of implications for the serious games movement.
The “Avatar Machine” was created by Marc Owens, a recent participant at the designers in residence program at the Design Museum in London.
Incorporating a physical, wearable costume inspired by (and apparently directly derived from) low-poly in-game character graphics, a suspended, back-mounted camera system, and a head-mounted visual interface, the Avatar Machine essentially allows a participant to move about and interact with an environment while viewing him/herself in the third person – an entity in a 3D world, viewing oneself outside oneself.
His statement for the piece:
“The virtual communities created by online games have provided us with a new medium for social interaction and communication. Avatar Machine is a system which replicates the aesthetics and visuals of third person gaming, allowing the user to view themselves as a virtual character in real space via a head mounted interface.
The system potentially allows for a diminished sense of social responsibility, and could lead the user to demonstrate behaviors normally reserved for the gaming environment.”
Game nerds everywhere rejoice (…?). Gamers are intimately familiar with the experience of visualizing a self-representational entity from a 3rd person/over-the-shoulder/behind-the-back viewpoint, as it remains a standard convention of perspective in 3D games. With that shared experience as the context for the piece, it would be wild to be able to have it translated to your actual, physical self and environment, though I expect gamers and non-gamers would approach that experience very differently.
“The system potentially allows for a diminished sense of social responsibility, and could lead the user to demonstrate behaviors normally reserved for the gaming environment.”
For the most part, the language of third-person perspective 3D games is the language of violence. To a lesser extent, it also includes spatial navigation, exaggerated physical movement/capability, AI interaction, and so on – but pick up any 3rd person perspective game, and chances are good that the predominant way of affecting the virtual environment is through a physically destructive capability.
Is this what the statement suggests is the end effect of the Avatar Machine on the user?
Bearing that in mind, this hypothetical seems a bit bold to me. Can it potentially lead users to this conclusion? Or does it encourage it? Is that almost the intention of the piece?
Additionally, how much of this is enabled by the simple fact that a weapon representation is incorporated into the costume itself? Is anti-social behavior encouraged more by the simple fact that the Avatar Machine includes a modeled sword?
The language of 3rd-person games: arrows and guns. …And swords.
If anti-social behavior is simply suggested by a sense of viewing yourself from a traditional violent game perspective, would the implications be the same were the user unfamiliar with these paradigms of gaming? If you’ve never experienced a third-person perspective violent game, or controlled a polygonal fighter in a virtual environment, why would you have any inclination of these things in the Avatar Machine?
For non-gamers, people unfamiliar with this viewpoint and its conventions in games, I think what would be most notable is a sense of detachment; a sense of being outside yourself.
Therefore, does Owens suggest that this sense of detachment would lead a user to said gaming-environment-type actions without having game experience? That the natural conclusion of a sense/perspective of physical personal detachment is this diminished sense of social responsibility, contextual game experience notwithstanding?
Another thought: what would be the difference in self-perception if there was no “costume,” no polygonal wearable parts? Having the outfit – clunky, low-res models reminiscent of late 90s era 3D game tech – adds an immediacy, a visual impact to the piece, but doesn’t necessarily say anything about self-perception; the user’s place in the environment as an individual. Rather, wearing it, you become a generic bunch of abstracted polygons.
What if it incorporated appropriately digitized textures of your face, clothing, hair, etc. to a generic model, a la some existing attempts at in-game player texture mapping for custom characters? What if you were no longer “blond spiky-haired hero” and instead a differentiated, distorted representation of yourself as an individual? How then would you approach your place in the environment?
“Real Kanojo” (Real Girlfriend) recently got some press.
To the best of my knowledge its the first dating/erotic simulator game to approach the uncanny valley of photorealism. Technologically speaking it also is by far the most ambitious thing I’ve heard of, incorporating webcam-based face-tracking that she can respond to, 3D stereoscopic glasses support to get the full bosomy effect, and so on. I’m not incredibly familiar with the topic, but dating sims and their more explicit variations have never quite caught on in the west like they have in Japan. Neither have Love Pillows – but hey, why not. Obviously, being a bit taboo here, this kind of release has generated a fair bit of interest and buzz.
Inevitably though, Lionhead’s early Natal showcase demo (Milo) comes to mind. Facial recognition first, speech recognition? Use of the real-time motion capture to capture the player’s physical body and movements? Natal could read your virtual position relative to an in-game entity, allowing interaction and influence. Although Natal most certainly will be limited in most respects, particularly in speech recognition, anything seems possible with that as a starting point.
When the Wii was released, there was definitely some speculation about the use of Wii in potentially adult contexts, and even on DS as well. One female game designer concepted an early abstract design built around the DS hardware constraints that centered on the use of the touch screen in “teaching techniques of female sexual gratification to a female target audience.”
Anyway, what I most enjoyed about hearing about this game is seeing some of the surrealistic visual rendering bugs that seem to be prevalent in the release for lower-capacity PCs. The level of photorealism combined with the sexual/fantasy/wish-fulfillment nature of this software seem to heighten the bizarreness of these images – making them all the more twisted. These two images were by far the highlights for me.
When people play this kind of game for arousal, the purpose is to get lost in the fantasy – to imagine it as if it were real, or to imagine yourself brought into in its unreality. Very few other types of games and interactive experiences result in something like this. Playing a FPS or RPG is traditionally all about escapism – but there is not an intended (usually) physical response in something as primal and fundamental as sexual desire (or release) in the player. Seeing the body/object sharply twisted and fragmented in this way is like a swift slap in the face – taking the player away from the fantasy immediately. Playing a non-erotic game and experiencing these kinds of bugs can be humorous or irritating – but I doubt quite as much as surreal or jarring as within this context.
Kotaku called it a “Real Girlfriend Gallery of Horrors“, but I think I’d be more likely to play a game with this kind of bizarre imagery as part of the gameplay than the original.
